Sean Fewster: Complex chain of legal arguments confuses Hillier triple murder case, causing more grief for victims’ bereaved family
ANALYSIS: The Hillier triple murder case has been thrown into disarray by a combination of admissions, denials and 11th-hour claims which, Sean Fewster says, will only cause more grief for the victims’ family.
- Peet admits to killing mother, denies killing her children
- Bodies of woman, two children, found in Hillier house
- ‘Torn between grief and fury’: Family mourns Hillier victims
- Social workers ‘visited just hours before Hillier murders’
BY his own admission, Steven Graham Peet is a murderer and he will be sentenced to life imprisonment for beating and strangling Adeline Yvette Wilson-Rigney.
However, after Tuesday’s events in the Supreme Court, that is the only certainty about the alleged Hillier triple murder and the criminal trial it has sparked.
For several months, Peet’s defence team sought to argue their client was mentally incompetent when Ms Wilson-Rigney, 28, and her children Amber, 6, and Korey, 5, were killed.
They were unsuccessful and so, on Monday, prosecutors began their case against Peet as they would any other.
What happened next was unexpected — Peet admitted murdering Ms Wilson-Rigney but denied responsibility for the children’s deaths.
Although unexpected, such declarations are not without precedent in multiple murder cases and prosecutors pressed on, outlining horrific details about the family’s last hours.
It was only after Ms Wilson-Rigney’s grieving relatives sat through those gruesome submissions that Peet revealed why he was pleading not guilty.
Though his counsel, he asserted that he was “an automaton” when the children died — and that his “disassociative state” was caused by domestic violence perpetrated by Ms Wilson-Rigney.
Put bluntly, Peet is claiming he lost control, and was mentally incapable of controlling his actions, when two children died because of an attack by the woman he admits he murdered.
That, he is saying, means he cannot be found guilty of murdering Amber and Korey because he was legally incapable of forming an intent to kill them.
And he is maintaining those claims in the face of not one, but six admissions — both on the day of the killings and in the weeks after — of guilt to multiple different people.
To say his 11th-hour assertion, based on a psychological report obtained last Thursday, caught prosecutors off-guard would be an understatement.
Mental health cases operate in a fundamentally different way to criminal trials and lead to medical detention instead of a jail cell.
Likewise, automaton and domestic violence defences — which have seen three women defend murder sentences in the past 17 years — are not conducted like “ordinary” murder trials.
Prosecutors will spend a doubtlessly long night determining where to go from here, as will Justice Malcolm Blue, who is hearing the trial in the absence of a jury.
On Wednesday, all parties will reconvene to discuss the future of Peet’s prosecution and what form the trial will take in the days to come.
Tragically, that means Ms Wilson-Rigney’s family — who have already been retraumatised by the evidence so far — are at risk of more grief and heartache before they see justice for her murder.